I appreciate the response, but honestly I’m still disappointed. You have an opportunity here to create a new breed of payment processor and you are squandering it. I’m sure Coinbase is successful, but is that all you want? Are you okay being just
another payment processor that happens to accept Bitcoin?
I am quite familiar with banks having varying levels of comfort with different industries (ours being adult comics), but that didn’t stop us from finding banks that were okay with what we publish and working with them. You should have relationships with multiple banks for situations like this. The fact that your company is locked into a bank that can arbitrarily deny merchant accounts, based on how comfortable they are with each business, is concerning.
More concerning is the fact that the first support email we received tried to pass our account closure off as a FinCEN issue, which only showed how little research was put into our case before the account was closed. How much effort is put into defending your merchants in situations like this?
Instead of closing accounts of small publishers or artists you should be defending them. You’d no doubt have a lot more adamant supporters. If you really do care, and you’re not just commenting to save face, I encourage you to reach out to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (http://cbldf.org/). They provide legal support and counsel for censorship issues like this. They have legally defended countless adult publishers, artists, and readers over the years.
As the CEO of Coinbase you have the resources to make a difference and fix situations like this for the future. Don’t be afraid to stand up and defend merchants, publishers, artists, or whoever else decides to use your service. If you want to be another payment processor that’s fine, but you could be so much more.